"The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone
records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest
telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April," Glenn Greenwald reports. "The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian,
requires Verizon on an 'ongoing, daily basis' to give the NSA
information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US
and between the US and other countries." Just as disturbing is the fact that we don't even know if AT&T and other major telecommunications companies have received similar secret orders.

There is no indication that this order to Verizon was unique or
novel. It is very likely that business records orders like this exist
for every major American telecommunication company, meaning that, if you
make calls in the United States, the NSA has those records. And this
has been going on for at least 7 years, and probably longer.

This type of untargeted, wholly domestic surveillance is exactly what EFF, and others have been suing about for years.

How is this legal?

There is, in fact, debate about whether it is legal, but The New York Timesexplains the government's theory:

The order was sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
the 1978 law that regulates domestic surveillance for national security
purposes, including "tangible things" like a business's customer
records. The provision was expanded by Section 215 of the Patriot Act,
which Congress enacted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

How is it tolerated by the American people?

That's the most pressing question. The civic negligence required to reach this point is the thing that most disappoints me about my fellow citizens, who ought to throw out every last member of Congress complicit in the metastasizing surveillance state. I am serious. Look up your representative. In a letter or phone call, demand they take a stand against this, on penalty of you voting against them in a primary or general.

That's how change happens when the president who promised it turns out to have lied.

We don't know if the federal government has a similar order for AT&T or any other carrier. Or if they're spying on Americans' emails as well. Why? That isn't the sort of thing President Obama thinks he needs to tell us, and Congress persists in giving him that latitude. Americans, who haven't been objecting to any of this in large numbers, aren't even demanding to know whether or not their government is assembling the most sophisticated surveillance state in human history.

Has fear of terrorism done this to us?

Apathy?

Denial?

Whatever the cause, the current behavior of the American electorate does not befit a free people.

The Supreme Court, the one branch of government not accountable to the people, hasn't been helpful either, though there is a passage from a Sonia Sotomayor concurrence that merits wider attention:

...it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed
to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in
which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to
third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People
disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular
providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which
they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books,
groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. Perhaps,
as JUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the "tradeoff" of privacy
for convenience "worthwhile," or come to accept this "diminution of
privacy" as "inevitable," and perhaps not.

I for one doubt that people
would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the
Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last
week, or month, or year. But whatever the societal expectations, they
can attain constitutionally protected status only if our Fourth
Amendment jurisprudence ceases to treat secrecy as a prerequisite for
privacy. I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed
to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason
alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection.

A change in jurisprudence is years away from happening, if it ever happens. The surveillance state as now constituted could be reined in quickly if only the American people demanded it. Wake up! Senator Mark Udall says that this is the kind of surveillance Americans will find shocking.

Is he right?

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Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.